Abstract

In A Political Theory of Territory, Margaret Moore’s basic thesis is that peoples gain rights to territories by occupying them. The current article challenges the underpinning social ontology of this normative theory. For Moore, a people is a collective agent meeting conditions of mutual identification and shared aspirations, political capacity, and a history of political cooperation. In turn, a people so understood occupy a territory when its members reside in it and plan their lives around their relationship to it. Against these conceptions, the current article argues that both notions – peoples and occupancy – fail, and for similar reasons, namely, an underlying subjectivism that creates more conflict than it resolves.